Let Me Be Frank With You

Deaths of Others

YESTERDAY, TWO DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, as I was eating breakfast on the sunporch, a strange thing happened, which was also a coincidence. I regularly tune in to WHAD-FM while I’m eating my All-Bran. The Yeah? What’s It To You? community squawk box comes on between eight and nine, and I enjoy listening to the views and personal life evaluations of my anonymous fellow citizens — as nutty as they sometimes are. For a man in retirement, these brief immersions offer a fairly satisfying substitute to what was once plausible, fully lived life.

Since October it’s been pretty much non-stop hurricane yak, in particular focusing on the less-acknowledged consequences of the killer storm — revelations that don’t make it to CBS but still need airing in order that an innocent public can be fully protected and informed. Much of the content, of course, turns out to be highly speculative. President Obama comes in for a fair amount of clobber. A surprisingly large segment of our Haddam population (traditionally Republican; recently asininely Tea Party) believes the President either personally caused Hurricane Sandy, or at the very least piloted it from his underground “boogy bunker” on Oahu, to target the Jersey Shore, where there are a lot of right-wing Italian Americans (there actually aren’t) who were all primed to vote for Romney, only their houses got blown away and they could no longer prove residency. The Boro of Haddam, it should be said, barely sustained a scratch in the storm, though that doesn’t stop people from voicing strong opinions.

Other callers have pointed out a “strange ether” the storm is suspected of having unearthed from the sea’s fundament, and that’s now become a permanent part of our New Jersey atmosphere, causing an assortment of “effects” we’ll all only know about many years from now, but that won’t be good.

Many, of course, express concerns that are fairly enough related to the storm’s aftermath, but that seem portentous as life signage. The sudden anxiety-producing appearance of the Speckled Siberian Warbler never before seen in these parts (what’s happening?). An old girlfriend phoning, after years of estrangement in now-demolished Ortley Beach, hoping to reconnect with “Dwayne,” who might be listening and harboring feelings of longing about how love broke down back in ’99. One woman with a subcontinental accent calls often and simply reads a different, slightly ominous Tagore poem about the weather.

Most of these citizen concerns express nothing but the anxious williwaws that snap us all into wakefulness at 3 A.M. — a worry that something’s happening, we don’t know what, but it’s bad; we could do something about it (move to the Dakotas), except we can’t face further upset in our lives. Though we can sound the alarm for others.

All this diverse palaver is interesting both as a measure of our national mood and humor — neither of which is soaring — and because it makes me realize how remote I am, this far inland, from such worries myself. As I say, nothing bad befell my house when the hurricane wreaked its vengeance. Though I feel that for most people, me included, this seemingly pointless speculation allows us to share a sense of consequence with the real sufferers, feel that something can be “shaken loose” in ourselves that wouldn’t get acknowledged otherwise. At the very least, it’s an interesting “tool kit” in empathy and agency — two things we should all be interested in.

Yesterday morning, however, as I stood washing my bowl at the sink and hearing the first footfalls of my wife treading to the bathroom upstairs, I heard on the radio what I believed was a voice I knew, and in fact had heard as recently as just days before. This was the coincidence.

It began, “… Yeah. Okay. I’m just, uh, calling to say I’m a dying man here in Haddam. I mean actually dying. And I’ve been listening for weeks to you people complaining and feeling sorry for yourselves about just being alive. I mean I’ve lived with myself a helluva long time now — same shoe size, same ears, same eye color, same nose, same dick dimensions.” (There’s no “delay” on WHAD; we depend on people to self-censor.) “And I’ve been…” (a cough) “… satisfied with all that. But I’ll tell you. I’m ready to turn the whole goddamn thing in. No rain checks. No do-overs. Since the goddamn Internet got started, nobody knows anything new to say anyway. Last year, I read — or maybe it was the year before — that two point four million people died in the U.S. That’s thirty-six thousand fewer than the year before. You all know this. I understand. I don’t know why I’m telling you. But it’s worrisome. We have to clear our desks and get out of the way.” (cough then a wheeze) “That’s what this goddamn hurricane’s telling us. I’m almost out of the office myself, here. And I’m not a bit sorry. But we have to pay attention! We…” Click.

“O-kay!” the show’s host said, rustling papers close to the microphone. “I guess… there are… ummm… all kinds of ways we can celebrate… ummm… Christmas together. Let’s get Dire Straits cued up here while I take a little break.”

I knew the caller’s voice. It was hoarser and thinner — and fragiler — than the Eddie Medley voice I’d known back in the ’70s, when my first wife, Ann, and our son Ralph moved to Haddam from New York so I could pursue a promising career as a novelist — a venture that promptly came unraveled. Eddie at that time had been about the happiest man anybody ever knew. Smart as Einstein (MIT chemical engineer), he’d laughed off an academic career in favor of being one of the Bell Labs wonder boys. His itch, though, was to get out in the world and start inventing stuff and making a shitload of dough. Which he did — a light, high-density polymer bond that kept a computer off-on switch from exploding. Eddie liked money and liked spending it. In fact, he liked to spend it more than he liked inventing things. And once he’d made his bundle, he realized what he really didn’t like was work. He promptly married a tall, buxom Swedish girl — Jalina (a head taller than he was, which Eddie thought was spectacular), and the two of them set off barging around the globe, scattering houses — in Val d’Isère, Västervick (where Jalina came from), London, and the South Island. He bought sports cars, collected African art and diamond bracelets, had a vast bespoke Savile Row wardrobe. He kept a Tore Holm in Mystic, owned a millionaire’s flat in Greenwich Village (plus his big “first house” in Haddam, on Hoving Road, where I first knew him). A scratch under five eight, jolly as a jester and handsome as Glenn Ford, Eddie reminded me and everybody at that time of an old-fashioned movie director/playboy, in a beret and jodhpurs, talking through a megaphone.

But in six years of no work, Eddie ran right through all his insulator money, lost everything but his Haddam house, and had to sell his patent to the Japanese. Jalina stuck around to be sure the last dollar was gone, then departed back to the cold countries (she didn’t ask for alimony. She’d spent it all). Eddie came back to his house, down the street from me. He had fresh offers to pitch in at Bell as a senior something-or-other, or in one of the think tanks sprouting up then in what had been farmers’ fields. But he still lacked a taste for work. He’d managed to squirrel away some offshore money the IRS (and Jalina) didn’t know about. He had no dependents. He concluded his acuity about women was probably suspect and that a life without that hair shirt was worth trying on. He took a job for a while as the science librarian at the Haddam Public. And when that became unbearable, he hung out an unusual shingle as the “Prince of Electronic Repair” and made house calls to fix people’s hi-fis or re-boot their alarm systems or program their remotes. When even that began to seem too much like work, he decided what thousands of Americans decide — people who have halfway winning personalities, no burning need for money, no aptitude for work or boredom, yet who have a willingness to think that driving around looking at other people’s houses is a reasonable way to pass a life when you can’t think of anything else. In other words, he became a realtor — at Recknun and Recknun, one of my competitors at the Lauren-Schwindell firm, where I worked until I married Sally and moved to The Shore in nineteen ninety-something. It’s not an unusual American story. Just as there’s no right way to plan a life and no right way to live one — only plenty of wrong ways.

For a time, when Eddie was back to Haddam in the mid-’80s after Jalina had left, he became an energetic member of the Divorced Men’s group, which a few of us sad sacks started out of a lack of imagination plus spiritlessness. Eddie was keen for us all to do things together — climb Mount Katahdin, take a cycling trip around Cape Breton, canoe the Boundary Waters, attend the French Open (Eddie was inept but fanatical). We Divorced Men, however, had zero interest in any of these activities and preferred just meeting in shadowy bars in Lambertville or at The Shore, getting quietly schnockered on vodka gimlets, nattering inconsequentially about sports, then eventually feeling shitty about life and critical of each other, and heading on home.

Eddie, though, didn’t own a suffering bone. He clattered on enthusiastically about his departed wife, waxed nostalgic about his growing-up life in the Mohawk Valley, the glory days in Cambridge where he was smarter than anybody and helped the other engineers with their matrix-vector multiplications; then about the flash years when nothing was too good or too much or too expensive, and how rewarded he felt to have had the patience to discover the one and only thing that would make Jalina (briefly) happy — wondrous excess. It was Eddie who gave us all nicknames, whether we liked them or not. “Ole Knot-head” for Carter Knott; “Ole Tomato” for Jim Warburton; “Ole Basset Hound” for me. Even one for himself, “Ole Olive”—after an appetizer-menu item he thought was hilarious in a dockside eatery where we’d fetched up one night in Spring Lake, after a desultory deep-sea fishing exploit where most of us got seasick. “Olive Medley.” As in, “I’ll have the olive medley and a scotch.” Eddie always made me like him by being the irrepressible tryer, something I then liked to think I’d been in my life but was almost certainly wrong about.

At a certain point, though, I just stopped seeing Eddie. He wandered away from the Divorced Men. He and I didn’t sell the same caliber of homes and were never in jousting contest. He was never all that keen about real estate to begin with. He had enough money. I heard he started a divinity degree at the Seminary, then quit. I heard later he’d gone abroad with the Friends Service and contracted dengue, causing his twin sister to move down from Herkimer and nurse him back to health. Once or twice I saw him riding an old Schwinn Roadmaster down Seminary Street. Then somebody said — Carter Knott — that Eddie was writing a novel (the last outpost for a certain species of doomed optimist). Eventually I met Sally, and we moved away to Sea-Clift, after which I never thought another thought about Olive Medley — so much was I both in and of my life by then, and in no mood to keep current with a blear past of divorce, distant children, death, and my own personal fidget-’n’-drift along life’s margins.

Until a phone call last week or possibly ten days ago; then a phone message that Sally heard but I didn’t — although I didn’t intend to do anything about either of them. Eventually she said, “… I think it’s someone who knows you. He doesn’t sound all that well…”

Later in the day I listened.

“Yeah. Okay. It’s Olive, Frank. Are you there? Olive Medley. Eddie. Haven’t seen you in some time. Years ago, I think. You live over on Wilson Lane, right. Number sixty.” I recognized Eddie, but then again I didn’t recognize him. He was the hoarse, rattling voice I later heard on the radio. A reedy emanation of thin-ness and debility wheezing down the fiber-optic highway. Not the tryer I liked once. And not sounds I wanted to hear more of. “Give me a call, Frank. I’m dying.” (Cough!) “Love to have a visit before that happens. It’s Olive.” (Could he have still called himself Olive?) “Call me.”

I had no intention of calling him. I’m of the view that calling me doesn’t confer an obligation that I have to respond — the opposite model from when I was in the realty business.

Approximately five days later, however, as Sally was leaving for South Mantoloking to resume her grief-counseling duties — her “giveback” to the hurricane relief (a source of growing wonderment and low-grade anxiety for me) — she stopped and stared at me where I was standing in the bathroom, combing my hair in the mirror after a shower. “Whoever that was who called twice last week called back,” she said. “It sounds important. Is his name Arthur?” Sally often starts conversations with me as if they were continuations of talks we’d been having two minutes ago, only it could be three weeks ago, or could have been only in her mind. She lives in her own head much of the time since the hurricane.

“Olive,” I said, frowning at a new dark spot on my temple. “Olive Medley.”

“Is that a name?” She was at the door, watching me.

“It was a nickname. Years ago.”

“Women never give each other nicknames,” she said, “except mean ones. I wonder why?” She turned and started down the stairs. I didn’t say I had no intention of calling Eddie back. Sally and I maintain different views of life ongoing, divergences that may not precisely fortify our union as committed second-time spouses, but don’t do harm — which can be the same as good. Sally views life as one thing leading naturally, intriguingly on to another; whereas I look at life in terms of failures survived, leaving the horizon gratifyingly — but briefly — clear of obstructions. To Sally, it would always be good to encounter an old friend. To me, such matters have to be dealt with case by case, with the outcome in doubt to the last.

Indeed, for months now — and this may seem strange at my late moment of life (sixty-eight) — I’ve been trying to jettison as many friends as I can, and am frankly surprised more people don’t do it as a simple and practical means of achieving well-earned, late-in-the-game clarity. Lived life, especially once you hit adulthood, is always a matter of superfluity leading on to less-ness. Only (in my view) it’s a less-ness that’s as good as anything that happened before — plus it’s a lot easier.

None of us, as far as I can tell, are really designed to have that many friends. I’ve done reading on this subject, and statistics from the Coolidge Institute (unfriendly to begin with) show that we each of us devote a maximum of 40 percent of our limited time to the five most important people we know. Since time invested determines the quality of a friendship, having more than five genuine friends is pretty much impossible. I’ve, for that reason, narrowed my important-time-with-others to time with Sally, to my two children (blessedly in faraway cities), to my former wife, Ann (now in a high-priced “care facility” uncomfortably close by). Which leaves only one important slot open. And that I’ve decided to fill by calling my own number — by making me my last, best friend. The remaining 60 percent I leave available for the unexpected — although I read for the blind on the radio once every week, and each Tuesday I drive to Newark Liberty to welcome home our returning heroes — which turns out to take up a good bit of the extra.

Like most people, of course, I was never a very good friend in the first place — mostly just an occasionally adequate acquaintance, which was why I liked the Divorced Men’s Club. Selling real estate is also perfect for such people as me, as is sportswriting — two pursuits I proved pretty good at. I am, after all, the only child of older parents who doted on me — the ne plus ultra of American adult familial circumstances. I was, thus, never in possession of that many friends, being always captivated by what the adults were doing. The standard American life-mold, especially in the suburbs, is that we all have a smiling Thorny Thornberry just over our back fence, someone to go to the big game with, or to talk things over late into autumn nights at some roadside bar; a friend who helps you hand-plane the fir boards to the precise right bevel edge for that canoe you hope, next June, to slide together into Lake Naganooki and set out for some walleye fishing. Only, that hasn’t been my fate. Most of my friends over time have been decidedly casual and our contacts ephemeral. And I don’t feel I’ve lost anything because of it. In fact, like many of the things we suddenly stop to notice about ourselves, once we’re fairly far down the line we are how we are because we’ve liked it that way. It’s made us happy.

Friendship, in fact, has always seemed over-rated. Back in my military-school yearbook, if some poor cadet was ever shackled with the phrase “A stalwart friend,” it always meant he was a pariah whom nothing else could be said or done for. Ditto college. Supposedly — this was also in the Coolidge Institute study — emotional closeness has declined 15 percent per year in the last decade, due to social and economic mobility eroding “genuine connectedness”—which we probably didn’t need anyway. Many things, in truth, that pass through my life and mind and which I might be inclined to “share” with a friend, I have nothing to say about. All the information we’re constantly collecting and storing up in our brains and that we trust we’ll later have a use for… what am I or any of us supposed to do with all of it? Especially at age sixty-eight? What am I supposed to do, for instance, with the fact that armadillos cause leprosy? Or that dog bites are on the uptick? Or that there’s a rise in the religiously unaffiliated and a trend toward less community involvement? Or that tsetse flies nurse their young, just like Panda bears? It beats me. I could put it on Facebook or Twitter. But, as Eddie Medley says, everybody knows everything, and already doesn’t know what to do with it. I’m not on Facebook, of course. Though both my wives are.

Is this “economizing on others” nothing but a blunt, shoring-up defense against death’s processional onset (as half the jury might argue)? Or, as the other half would agree, is it a blunt, shoring-up acceptance of the very same thing? I’d say neither. I’d say it’s a simple, goodwilled, fair-minded streamlining of life in anticipation of the final, thrilling dips of the roller coaster. During which ride I don’t want to be any more distracted than I already am.

In any case, most of my friends are already dead or, like Eddie, soon will be. Every week, my reading in The Packet involves — first thing — a visit to the Corrections box on page two, for concise, reliable attendance on setting the record straight, once and for all. It’s satisfying to have something be correct — no matter what the subject is — even on the second try. After that, once I see if there’s anyone I know who’s croaked, I read at least one non-celebrity obituary — what in newpapers of yore used to be called the “Deaths of Others” page (no four-star generals or nonagenarian actresses or Negro League standouts). I do this, of course, to honor the deceased, but also quietly to take cognizance of how much any life can actually contain (a lot!), while acknowledging that for any of us a point comes when most of life’s been lived and there’s much less of it than there used to be, and yet what’s there is not to be missed or pissed away in a blur. It’s a true corrective to our woolly, reflexive shiverings about “the end.” Jettisoning friends (I could provide a list, but why bother, there weren’t many)… jettisoning friends, along with these small, private acts of corrective thinking, has altogether made death mean a great deal less to me than it used to; but better yet, has made life mean a great deal more.

So far I haven’t spoken about any of this to Sally, although I mean to. She would only tell me — since she now sees the world through a prism of grief — that I started feeling this way because of the hurricane and the terrible, anonymous death it exacted; and that my actions (jettisoning friends, etc.) are a version of deep grief, which she could counsel me about if I’d let her. Since October she’s been dedicating herself, over on The Shore, to elderly Jersey-ites who’ve lost everything, trying to give them something to look forward to at average age ninety-one. (What could that be?) Though lately I’ve noticed her more and more staring at me, as she did when I was combing my hair in the bathroom, and she was questioning me about Eddie. By staring, it’s almost as if she wants to ask me, “Where did you come from?” Or more to the point, “Where did I come from? And why, by the way, am I here now?” I take this to be some unknown-by-me-yet-well-documented syndrome of grief counseling, and itself another consequence of the hurricane, like the callers on WHAD are always going on about. Sally’s at present studying for her state grief-counseling “certification” and is only an “adult trainee”—though she’s proved herself skillful and is much in demand at the disaster sites. But if you’re a grief counselor and hard at the hard business of counseling the truly grieved — whereas I’m only here on the sidelines and not, in my opinion, suffering any evident grief — then the natural inclination would be to suspect that I’m either irrelevant, or that I’m suffering an even worse grief than anyone knows. Or third, that I’m a malcontent who has too much time on his hands and needs to find better ways to be useful. Determining which of those is true isn’t so easy in any life.

On another occasion, when I noticed Sally staring at me in the undisguisedly estimating way she’s lately adopted, she said — wrinkling her nose as if she smelled something bad—“Sweetheart, have you ever thought of writing a memoir? Your life’s had a pretty interesting trajectory, if you ask me.”

This is not true at all. My life’s fine, in most ways, but doesn’t have a “trajectory.” It’s only the budding mental-health professional in Sally to want to compliment and encourage me — a form of freelance counseling. Though less likably, saying this gives the spurious concept of a “trajectory” a pointless life of its own. In other words, it gives me something different to deal with instead of what I am dealing with — which, happily enough, is not that much.

“Not really,” I said in reply to the memoir-trajectory suggestion. I was at that moment on my knees, tightening a threaded drain-collar under the kitchen sink, where the coupling had leaked and rotted the floorboards. I wasn’t being completely truthful. Years ago, when my career as a novelist went south, and before I signed on to be a sportswriter in New York, I’d thought (for about twenty minutes) of writing “something memoiristic” about the death of my young son Ralph Bascombe. At that time, all I could come up with was a title, “In the Hands of a Lesser Writer” (which seemed merely accurate), and a good first line, “I’ve always suffered fools well, which is why I sleep so soundly at night.” I had no idea what that meant, but after writing it, I had nothing else to say. Most memoirists don’t have much to say, though they work hard trying to turn that fact into a vocation. “Truth is,” I said to Sally from up under the sink, “I’ve been decommissioning polluted words out of my vocabulary lately. You may not have noticed. I’m keeping an inventory.” I cocked my head around and smiled up at her from the kitchen floor like a happy plumber. I didn’t want to dismiss her suggestion out of hand, though neither did I want to give it serious thought. I knew that my decommissioning words could very easily make her think I was unhinged. She already believes that because I had a happy childhood, I’ve probably suppressed a host of bad things (which I hope is true). Any thought of saying I was also now jettisoning friends would’ve made an even more airtight argument for my holding on to a “secret grief”—something I have no evidence of and don’t believe.

She gave me another one of the “looks”—hip thrown, mouth mumped, brows worried, arms crossed, right foot wagging on its heel, the way you might stand in line at Rite Aid when things were taking too long.

“Will you tell me something?” Her thumbs began touching the tips of her fingers on both hands — doing it, then doing it again, like a compulsive.

“I’ll try,” I said, back tightening the threaded collar on the sink drain with a pipe wrench four times bigger than I needed but that once belonged to my father and thus was sacred.

“What do you think of me?”

Cooped up under the fetid sink — plastic cleanser bottles, astringents, nasty sponges, Brillo pads, colorful scrubbers, a couple of grimy mousetraps, and the sweet-smelling yellow-plastic garbage pail unhealthily near my face — I managed to say, “Why do you want to know that?”

“Things can change,” she said. “I know that.”

“Not everything,” I said. “That’s why most memoirs aren’t any good. It takes genius to make that fact interesting.”

“Oh,” Sally said.

What I thought she really meant by asking such a question for no good reason was: “What do I think of you?” It’s not an unusual question. Married people ask it night and day whether they know it or not, especially second-tour veterans like us. They just rarely say it — like Sally didn’t. I was being routinely evaluated. It happens. But I still didn’t want to write a memoir. Reading for the blind and welcoming home heroic soldiers at the airport is plenty enough for me as “my contribution”—and therapy.

“I love you,” I said, as the collar snugged satisfyingly against the pipe and bit into the white silicone I’d applied.

“Do you really think you do?” Her pretty head and face and mouth and eyes were above me. Possibly she was looking out the kitchen window at our snowy back yard. Our lawyer neighbors had swagged tiny white Christmas lights all through the leafless oak boughs. Their back yard glittered and shone. They are party givers.

“I think it and live it,” I said, fingering the pipe and the emulsion for a guilty hint of moisture, and finding none. I began backing out with my huge wrench.

“I love you. I…” Sally started to say something more, then paused and stepped aside so I could climb up, holding the lip of the sink. “I guess I’m under a strain with my clients. I feel a little incognito.” She took a sip from a glass of Sancerre she’d poured without my knowing it. Tiny tree lights outside were twinkling in the afternoon gloom of mid-December. “You’re not grieving at all, are you?” A tear in her left eye but not her right. Her wonderful asymmetry. One of her legs is also slightly shorter than its mate — and yet perfect.

“Not this pig,” I said. My old Michigan joke. “I’m the happiest man in the world. Don’t I oink it?”

“You do. You oink it,” she said. “Just checking. Sorry.” And that seemed to do the trick.

WHEN I WOKE UP THIS MORNING, CHRISTMAS EVE day, I found myself thinking of Eddie Medley. Something in his voice — the phone message and on the radio — hoarse, frail, but revealing of an inward-tending-ness that spoke of pathos and solitude, irreverence and unexpected wonder. More the tryer than I’d first thought, but caked over by illness and time. Even in a depleted state, he seemed to radiate what most modern friendships never do, in spite of all the time we waste on them: the chance that something interesting could be imparted, before-the-curtain-sways-shut-and-all-becomes-darkness. Something about living with just your same ole self all these years, and how enough was really enough. I didn’t know anyone else who thought that. Only me. And what’s more interesting in the world than being agreed with?

But still. Nobody wants to see a dying man — not even his mother. Had I thought one thought about Eddie prior to now, he’d have been on the list for jettisoning. But since I no longer have to do anything I don’t want to do, feeling an active, persistent sensation of reluctance can become a powerful source of interest all its own, after which doing the supposedly unwanted thing can become irresistible. As old Trollope said, “Nothing surely is as potent as a law that may not be disobeyed.” I could at least call Eddie on the telephone.

I therefore hunted up the Haddam “purple pages.” An Edward Medley still resided at #28 Hoving Road, four down and across from my old Tudor family home — long since bulldozed for a rich man’s showplace — then rife on the Haddam townscape, but less so now with realty cratered and Bush’s recession that Obama took the heat for.

Standing in the kitchen, I called Eddie’s number — because I could. A watery-warm, half-sunny springlike morning had turned the tree trunks damp and black and punky. The ground was sogged, almost snowless, and puddled — the grass showing-through still green, the rhododendrons unfurled as if it was March. Three nights before, when I drove to visit my former wife, Ann, in her fancy facility where she has Parkinson’s, winter’s icy curtain had already descended — rain, sleet, snow, and cold fused together. Today, all was forgiven.

“Mr. Medley’s house,” a softly resonant, funereal voice said. A man’s. Not Eddie’s.

“Hi,” I said. “It’s Frank Bascombe calling. I’m trying to reach Eddie. He left me a couple of messages. I’m just calling back.” My heart started whomping — boompety, boomp, boomp, boompety. I knew already. A miscalculation. Potentially a bad one — the sweetening weather possibly was the resolve weakener, along with having too much time on my hands. As I’ve been told. I began handing the receiver to its wall cradle, as if I’d just seen a burglar’s head pass my window and needed to find a place to hide, my heart boompeting…

“Is it ole Basset?” A drastic voice buzzed through the extended earpiece, trapping me with my name. Basset Hound. Why are we such fuck-ups? Why couldn’t the wrong thing just declare itself without my having to dip a fucking toe in? Errors are errors long before we commit them. “Frank?” Eddie — hoarse, failing, spectral voice and all — had me pinioned via his speaker phone, through which he sounded even more back-from-the-dead than before. And nobody I wanted to talk to. A big, eruptive tussis boiled up through the line. I should’ve clicked off, “lost” the connection and beat it out the front door. Most people are happy with someone having tried. “Are you there, Basset?” Eddie was shouting. The dense webbing in his lungs made a worrisome, organic groaning noise. “Oh, shit,” he said. “I lost the fucker.”

“I’m here,” I said tentatively.

“He’s on! I got him. Okay!” Whoever owned the funereal voice — a male nurse, a hospice worker, a “companion”—also said “Okay,” from the background.

“When’re you coming over here?” Eddie shouted. “You better hurry up. I’m hearing bells.”

Not that far away on Hoving Road, Eddie was hearing the same bells I was hearing in my kitchen — the carillon at St. Leo the Great RC, gonging out Angels we have heard on-high, sweetly singing o’er the plain.. .

“Well… Look. Eddie…” I tried to say.

“Why didn’t you call me back, you jackass?” Cough. Groan. Organ deep “Uuuhooo wow. Jesus.”

“I am calling back,” I said, irritably. “This is calling back. I’m doing it. I was busy.” Boomp-boomp-boomp.

“I’m busy, too,” Eddie said. “Busy getting dead. If you want to catch me live, you better get over here. Maybe you don’t want to. Maybe you’re that kind of chickenshit. Pancreatic cancer’s gone to my lungs and belly. I’m not catching, though…”

“I’ll…”

“It is goddamn efficient. I’ll say that. They knew how to make cancer when they made this shit. Two months ago I was fine. I haven’t seen you in a long time, Frank. Where the hell have you been?” Cough, wheeze. “Uuuhooo,” again.

The mellow male voice said, “Just ease back, Eddie.”

“Okay. Owwww! That goddamn hurts. Owww. OWWW!” Something was crunching against the speaker like Christmas foil. “What’re you trying to do to me… Frank? Are you coming?”

“I’m…” Eddie was way too much of a tryer, I saw — the way he always was. I never really liked him, agreement or no agreement.

“I’m what? I’m an asshole? Grant a dying man his wish, Frank. Is that too much for you? I guess it is. Jesus.”

“Okay. I’ll come,” I said quickly — trapped, miserable. “Sit tight, Eddie.”

“Sit tight?” Cough. “Okay. I’ll sit tight. I can do that.”

The soft voice again, “That’s good, Eddie. Just…” Then the line was empty between us. I was alone and breathless — in my kitchen. A pronged filament of golden sunlight passed through the chilled window from the back yard, brightened the dark countertop in front of me. My heart was still rocketing, my hand clutching the receiver out of which someone had just been speaking to me and now was gone. Too fast. Reluctance to acquiescence. I hadn’t meant it to come out this way. Possibly I didn’t have enough to do. I needed to find strategies to avoid such moments as this.

A WITTERING URGENCY HAS COMMANDEERED MY DAY and self. Plans I might’ve had have gone a-flutter. Packing for my Christmas Day trip to KC is postponed. Practice, which I do for reading-to-the-blind, is now put off ’til later (I’m reading Naipaul — always tricky). I know I’ve claimed to leave 60 percent of available hours for the unexpected — a galvanizing call to beneficent action, in this case. But what I mostly want to do is nothing I don’t want to do.

Still, in thirty minutes, I’m out the door, to my car and the moist, milky winter-warm morning. A big L-10 is just whistling over — so low I can almost see tiny faces peering down, quizzical, as New Jersey’s middle plain rises to greet them. On our rare ocean-wind days, the Newark approaches shift westward, and the in-bounds from Paris and Djibouti lumber in at tree tops, so that we might as well live in Elizabeth. The current warm snap also denotes new weather moving across from Ohio, readying a jolly white Christmas for wise stay-at-homes, though a nightmare for the imprudent — me — flying on Christmas Day, using miles.

My Christmas-trip idea, in its first positive iteration, was for a festive family fly-in to ole San Antone (my life-long dream is to visit the Alamo — proud monument to epic defeat and epic resilience), all bankrolled by me, including a stay at the Omni, an early-season Spurs’ game, capped off by a big Christmas almuerzo at the best “real Mexican” joint money could buy — La Fogata, on Vance (I did my research). Others could then wander the River Walk and do as others wanted, while Sally and I took a driving trip up to the Pedernales and the LBJ shrines — locales of dense generational interest and meaning; then backtrack through Austin so I could see the Charles Whitman Tower from sixty-six, then be climbing onto Southwest by the twenty-eighth, headed home to the Garden State.

None of which worked out. Sally decided the grievers of South Mantoloking needed her “at this critical holiday season” more than I did. Clarissa, in Scottsdale, is currently having “issues” with her brother, who means to expand his garden-supply business to include a rent-to-own outlet in the building next door — which she and I oppose. They’re not talking. In the face of our opposition, Paul has declared the Alamo (the “à la mode” in his parlance) to be an historical bad joke and waste of time and blood, and that no one should ever enter Texas in the first place. Instead, he’s insisted I come to KC, where he can grill me about his rent-to-own theories. Not very appealing, to be honest. Though it’s what I’ve decided, since there are days (which must be true for all fathers) when I badly miss my surviving son — as strange a man as he is and will be. Plus, I don’t want to be home alone on Christmas.

I am, though, questioning my wisdom this morning — with the possibility of a weather lockdown at Newark and snow up to my butt. In the world today, no one should experience a wittering urgency without knowing there’s a cause somewhere close by, even if you can’t see it.

My Wilson Lane neighborhood, as I drive down to the Choir College and turn toward Haddam’s west end, is a far cry from the days when I flogged houses here and my kids were young. Although the casual observer might not notice much has been altered.

Most of the small, frame, President-streets houses, on their manageable fifty-foot lots, look as they have since the boomer ’90s. Though residential stock has slowly begun passing into less confident hands — the banks, absentee owners, weekenders from Gotham, and property managements. They mostly keep things ship-shape, but not as if every owner lived in every abode the way they used to.

And more change is already in evidence. A code variance for a chiropractor. A single-hand lawyer’s-office conversion where a widow recently lived and died. A holistic wellness center with Pilates and Reiki gurus inside. An online travel agent and copy shop. Following which, it’s a quick descent to a head shop, a T-shirt emporium, a RadioShack, and a tattoo/nail salon. Mixed use — the end of life as we know it. Though my bet is I’ll be in my resting place before that bad day dawns. If there’s a spirit of one-ness in my b. ’45 generation, it’s that we all plan to be dead before the big shit train finds the station.

In the eight years since Sally and I arrived back from Sea-Clift, we haven’t much become acquainted with our neighbors. Very little gabbing over the fence to share a humorous “W” story. Few if any spontaneous invitations in for a Heineken. No Super Bowl parties, potlucks, or house-warmings. Next door might be a Manhattan Project pioneer, Tolstoy’s granddaughter, or John Wayne Gacy. But you’d hardly know it, and no one seems interested. Neighbors are another vestige of a bygone time. All of which I’m fine with.

However, just after Thanksgiving, a month ago, I found a letter in my mailbox, hand-addressed in pencil to RESIDENT. On a sheet of coarse, lined, drugstore bond, in block letters was a message that said, “Sir or Madame. My name is Reginald P. Oakes. I was convicted of carnal knowledge of a juvenile in 2010. I now reside at 28 Cleveland Street, Haddam, New Jersey. 085_.”

“They have to do that,” Sally said, finishing a client report at the dining room table. Being a grief counselor-in-training, she’s now versed in all things publicly protective and child sensitive. “It’s part of their release deal. If you petition the court, he’ll have to move. It’s pretty unfair, if you ask me.”

I took little note, but not no note.

Not long before that, in August, another letter turned up, this one addressed to me on official blue-and-white American Express letterhead. It contained a brand-new AMEX card in the name of a Muhammad Ali Akbar, who as far as I could find out, no one here-around knew. This letter I hand-delivered to the Haddam PD, but have since heard nothing back. Twice then in the fall, the Garden State Bank, which has foreclosed on two houses on our block, authorized the same police to stage mock hostage extractions in one of the now-empty homes, just a few doors down. We all stood in our yards and watched as SWAT units broke in the front door of what had been a former Democratic mayor’s daughter’s townhouse, until she got divorced and booted out. There was a lot of wild shouting and bullhorns blaring and lights flashing and sirens whooping, plus the appearance of some kind of robot. After which a tiny African American woman (Officer Sanger, whom we all know) was led out in handcuffs and driven away to “safety.”

How these occurrences foretell changes that’ll eventuate in a Vietnamese massage becoming my new neighbor is far from clear. But it happens — like tectonic plates, whose movement you don’t feel ’til it’s the big one and your QOL goes away in an afternoon.

All signs bear watching: how many visits Animal Control makes to your block in a month; whether the lady across the street marries her Jamaican gardener to secure him a green card; how often a barking dog appears on the roof next door — like in Bangalore or Karachi; how many Koreans of the same family grouping buy in, in a two-year period. Last week I walked out to sprinkle sno-melt on the walk so the postman, who happens to be named Scott Fitzgerald, wouldn’t slip and end up suing me. And right in the crusty grass I found someone’s upper plate — as intimate and shocking as a human body part. Who knows who’d left it there — as a joke, out of frustration, as an act of vengeance, or just as a sign of things to come that can’t at this late stage in civilization be interpreted. My old, departed friend Carter Knott (an Alzheimer’s casualty who one winter night went kayaking off Barnegat Lighthouse and never found the shore again) used to say to me: “The geniuses are the people who spot the trends, Frank, the ones who see Orion where the rest of us assholes just see a bunch of pretty stars.” What’s trending around me now and here — my own neighborhood — I’m sure I’ll never have the time or genius to figure out.

I DO NOTICE, AS I CROSS HODGE ROAD TO THE WELL-HEELED west side — my window down to take in the unseasonable springtime breezes — that a briny-sulfur tang now floats about, as if the hurricane’s insult has vaporized and come inland, two months on, leaving a new stinging atmosphere everyone senses but would just as soon not. Possibly the radio callers aren’t so crazy after all.

Eddie Medley’s big, in-town mansion at #28 is, to my eye, little changed from his glory days of invention, mammon, the Swedish wife, boats, cars, voyages — the grinning, well-heeled devil-may-care-when-everybody-was-your-pal. Eddie’s is one of the old, lauded west-side ramblers, far back from the street and visible only in peeks through the privet and yews and rhododendrons the driveway winds through. Ann used to covet Eddie’s house as her “perfect house,” disparaging our old Tudor half-timber as kitsch — which it was, and which was the idea. (I loved it and mourned when it got hauled down by a family of right-wing, proto-Tea-Party Kentucky brown-shirts, who backed David Duke for President and kept a private army at the ready in the coal-mining hills, but who ultimately grew demoralized by how many Jews there were up the seaboard — plenty — and retreated back to Ironville where white people run everything.)

Eddie’s house indeed rambles all the hell around into the trees in “wings” that extend from the pillared and pedimented Greek Revival original home place. The add-ons were built by successive generations of owners, so kids could have their own “space,” so phalanxes of new wives could have a dance-and-yoga studio, a dark room, a gallery for the mezzo-American collection, a solarium, a herbarium, a print shop, a greenhouse, and a screening room. Plus, a granny apartment, and more than one neat little place just to be quiet in and think, while the men of the house were off in Hong Kong and Dubai doing mammoth deals to bring in tons of money to pay for everything. It’s not an unusual house history on the west side. Though the unhappy result is that few who abide here now have much of a toehold on where they live — the way real people used to. Money sweeps in, money sweeps out. Only the houses — grand and still and equity-rich — testify to the lives that pass through.

Eddie, however, is an exception, having owned his big larruping, cobbled-up pile since the ’70s, when he paid 350K and could now (Eddie’s “now,” of course, is about to transfer to “then”) bring 4 mil and maybe more. Though as I come to a stop in the pea-gravel front turnaround that encircles a lump of female-inspired bronze sculpture that could be a Henry Moore, I see his house has suffered considerable “deferred maintenance”—realtor lingo for physical decline destined to inflict wounds to the wallet. Eddie’s house could use a paint job, a new roof, new sills and soffits, and some repointing in its brick foundation and chimneys. The Greek columns could stand new pedestals. The rambling wings are also showing subsidence signs, suggesting unaddressed water issues (or worse). Four million might be optimistic. Not that Eddie gives a shit. Though if an emir or an oligarch or an African warlord with a Wharton MBA bought the place, the first thing he’d do would be to level it, the way the rabid Kentuckians leveled my old house, flattening the past and all my old dreams in a day.

As I’m climbing out of my car, Eddie’s white front door unexpectedly opens back and out toddles Fike Birdsong — a human I do not want to see, and giving an unhappy twist to the words a sight for sore eyes. Fike’s dented old Cherokee, I now see at the house side of the driveway, where I hadn’t noticed it but should’ve.

Fike is a minister-minus-portfolio; an eager-beaver balls-of-his-feet Alabama Princetonian and Theological Institute grad, who’s always popping up when you don’t want him to, and who nobody in his right mind would trust with a congregation of goats. Fike’s lurked around Haddam for years, doing the morning devotional on WHAD, filling in at Newark airport as a “Delta chaplain” (plane-crash duties), and officiating at funerals and weddings where nobody has any beliefs but wants a church send-off anyway. He’s also an egregious Romney-Ryan supporter (his car bears their sticker), and since the election behaves as if “Mitt” actually won, only the rest of us are too stupid to know it.

Fike’s also a preposterous in-line skater. I often see him whizzing down Seminary Street in an electric green zoom helmet, dick-packer tights way too small for his bulgy dimensions, and orange-and-black Princeton knee pads. He’s been married multiple times, has kids scattered all over, lives in a dismal little bachelor rental in Penns Neck, and always acts as if he and I are old friends. Which we’re not. Fike never ventures near spiritual matters with me, preferring to steer as near as possible to right-wing politics, where his heart is, and which he may believe we share. You know people in a town this size, whether you know them or not. I’m certain Fike’s never come closer to a “godly experience” than a duck has to driving a school bus. He is a typical southerner in this way. Seeing him here makes me want to jump in my car and speed away.

“Our old friend’s not doin’ real good in there, Frank. I’m sorry to say it.” Fike begins nodding in his world-weary way before we’re close enough to converse, given the hushed tones he considers appropriate. Fike knows I’m a southerner and enjoys putting it on, as if it makes me feel at ease. It doesn’t. “He’s sorely sufferin’. I tried to render myself available to hear his confession. But he’s standing firm there.” Fike, of course, is not a Catholic. He’s Pleistocene C-of-C’er, but wouldn’t let that get in the way. There’s a creepy tone to everything he says — a flicker in the fleshy, twitchy corners of his mouth signals it: all this spirituality bidnus is really pretty goddamn funny, only I and you are the only ones who understand it: God. Death. Grief. Salvation. A hoot when you really think about it. Fike’s morning devotionals all have this tickle-your-funny-bone, cloyingly Christian pseudo-irreverence calculated to paint God Almighty as just one of the boys. “It’s not always gay being gay.” (I listen in if I’m up at six, just to piss myself off.) “How close is square one to cloud nine?” “Don’t make me come down there!” (One of his few indistinct references to the deity.) “It’s a slippery slope to the moral high ground.” I’m sure Fike thinks these make people like him and be more apt to let him perform non-denominational grave-side services. Ultimately, though, Fike’s no more sincere about god than an All-State agent.

“How do you happen to be here, Fike,” I say, disguising my distaste with the semblance of curiosity. Fike’s barely medium stature, wears black horn-rims, a cheap black suit, has his hair side-parted in an ear-lowering brush cut, and carries a black ministerial briefcase containing, I’m sure, the shabby tricks of his trade — holy water vial, a few stale hosts, an aspergillum, an assortment of crosses, a maniple, an exorcist kit, plus a value-pak of spearmint and a copy of Men’s Health. Just for today, he’s also wearing a one-faith-fits-all purple priest’s collar camouflaging whatever mischief he’s up to here.

“Frank, you might know, I’ve been Eddie’s spiritual adviser for some time. At his invitation.” Fike elevates visibly on the balls of his feet, as if what he’s said has made him taller.

“Why does Eddie need a spiritual adviser?”

“That’s a question you have to ask your self, Frank.” Fike’s mouth-corners twitch with seamy significance. He’s gotten fatter since I last saw him. His round cheeks are pink and unsatisfyingly glowing, as if he’s pinched himself just before stepping outside.

“I won’t be asking myself that, Fike. I watch a good bit of TV now. That’s enough.”

“I see your good wife over in Mantoloking, Frank. I perform some counseling over there. She’s doing sovereign work, I can promise you. A lot of grief’s left unexpressed after the storm. You probably know that.”

“So she tells me.” If Fike says my name one more time I may grab him by his idiot collar and drag him to the ground. Much more than I dislike Fike, he embarrasses me. Though I’m aware embarrassment owes to the fear that some quality in him is identical to some quality in me that I like. The appearance of tolerance. I’m sure Eddie only keeps Fike around for laughs.

A pair of big black crows up in Eddie’s giant elephant-skin copper beech begins cawing noisily down at us. Out on Hoving Road I hear the grumble of the TRASH-8-8-8 truck the Boro now outsources our garbage to. Service here is better than where I live. I again hear the bells Eddie heard — gong, gonging, Joy to the world, the Lord is come.. .

“Tell me something, Fike.” I say this because I can’t not. “What the hell’s wrong with just grieving by yourself? When my son died, I managed my own grief.” Misery, I’ve learned, doesn’t really love company, just like nature doesn’t abhor a vacuum. Nature, in fact, accommodates vacuums pretty well.

“Frank, do you know Horace Mann?” Fike’s pink tongue tip makes a roguish tour of his lips. He’s not going to answer me. I don’t really want him to, anyway.

“Not personally. No.”

“Well. Horace Mann, Frank, said — or wrote — I was just reading his biography last night, trying to write a Christmas devotional with some meat on its bones. Horace Mann said, ‘Unless you’ve done something for humanity, you should be afraid to die.’ I thought that was interesting. Doing something for humanity.” Fike crosses his chubby arms over his fat briefcase and hugs it like a life preserver, then makes his mouth into a little peachy pucker as if he’s waiting for what I might say next. Fike’s fingers are slender and pretty like a girl’s and have trimmed, pink, well-tended nails. He is a rare breed of asshole.

The big crows caw at us again where we stand on the damp pea gravel. Each of us, I’m sure, wants the other to go away.

“I’ll think about that, Fike. Thanks.”

“You know, Frank. When I think about Governor Romney versus this President we currently have — which I do a lot — I think I know which of them fears death the most. As I’m sure you do.” Fike nods. His moist mouth corners flicker up then down then up. He’s registering, he believes, a delicious little victory. I look at the bumper of my Sonata to see if I still have my Obama sticker. I mostly do. I started scraping it off after Thanksgiving then forgot. Fike, the little pastoral weasel, has observed it — which is why he brings up “this President.” It is his only religion. Politics and dough. God’s just the day job.

I say nothing, just stare back at him. If “this President” fears death it’s because he knows the Fike Birdsongs of the world are gunning for him. I once saw Fike stepping out of the Vietnamese massage establishment out on Route 1—a flat-roofed, windowless, cinder-block bunker — formerly a Rusty Jones — with its lighted sign-on-wheels out front. KumWow. I could make a cheap reference to it now. Fike could work it into his Yuletide message. What Horace Mann would say about KumWow? A solace for our unexpressed griefs? Only, it’s Christmas Eve. And even for a non-believer, desist is easier than engage. Though I wonder what Fike’s father thinks of him, down in Fairhope. Fike’s about my son Ralph’s age — or would be.

Above his little purple priest’s collar, Fike stares at me hungrily. Silence is the best defense against non-entities — let them become insubstantial, like a retreating fog. I sniff the sharp-sulfurous sea tang blown inland from the shore. Hazards ride its whispering waves.

“Frank. Don’t act too shocked when you see poor ole Eddie. Okay? He’s looking rough. Underneath he’s still Eddie, though. He’ll really appreciate you coming.” Fike’s become confident again — all by himself. To prove it he sets his mouth into a downward-curving parabola, like a banker nullifying a loan extension. Bong, bong, bong. Let e-e-e-vry hear-ar-art, pre-pa-re hi-um roo-ooo-oom, and heavin ’n nachure sing.. .

“I’ll try to steel myself, Fike.”

“Maybe I’ll see you on the radio, Frank?” Fike hugs his briefcase tighter, backing away from me, as if we were in a narrow alley out here. “I like that Narpool you’ve been reading on the air. Though not that much happens there, wouldn’t you say?”

“That’s the point, Fike. You have to be available to what’s not evident.”

“Look out, now! That’s my line of work, Frank. Evidence of things unseen, etc. Hebrews Two.” This pleases him. He brightens supremely, backing away still. We’ve found our point of assent — in the unseen — a sacred accord that will let us go our separate ways to Sunday — which we do. Blessedly.

EDDIE’S FRONT DOOR IS ONCE AGAIN PULLED OPEN, this time by a big, pillowy black woman in tight red toreadors with little green Christmas trees printed all over them. She gives me an indifferent look and stands back for me to come in. She’s wearing a green scrub-in smock and cracked white nurse’s shoes her big feet have badly stressed. A stethoscope hangs off her neck. A yellow sponge is in one hand, as if she’s been doing dishes. She smells of peppermint.

“I’m Frank Bascombe,” I say, half whispering. “I think Eddie’s expecting me.”

“All right,” she says as I come in. “Finesse,” she says, which I take to be her name. “I’m his hospice nurse. He been kickin’ up dust, waitin’ for you.” She steps off, leading me to the right, out of the shadowy foyer and the main house’s front parlor — Greek Revival, pocket doors, bookcases, a sunny breakfast nook visible through doors to the back. Everything in the original part’s been done in ultramodern-’70s style — shiny tube-steel and leather chairs, the walls hand-painted in bold, jagged red-and-green striping and hung with large black-and-white photographs of the Serengeti, wattle huts, Mount K, an immense and motionless river with rhinos cavorting, and lots of artifacts around — a ceremonial zebra-skin drum-table, spears clustered in an elephant’s-foot umbrella stand, walls of hollow-eyed masks and shields and breastplates made of leopard fur — the dark continent’s designer side. Everything’s silent and pristine. No life’s transpired here, possibly, since the lady of the house flew back to square-head land, leaving it as her monument.

Finesse’s size and swaying stride create a peppermint airstream, where I’m following behind. “I thought that funny l’il preacher — whatever he was — wasn’t ever gonna leave,” she’s saying as if she and I know each other. “Fice. Idn’t that a dog’s name? I don’t b’lieve I met you. I did meet some of them.” She’s leading me through a dark screening theater and on into a paneled man-study with Vanity Fair prints, crossed wooden tennis rackets, the (apparently) complete Harvard Classics and a big Cape buffalo’s head staring somberly down off the wall. We pass then into a club room — snooker table, highboy chairs, Tiffany lamps, deep-cranberry walls, cue racks, chalks, a triangle of red balls on a perfect green nap. Again, nothing seems in use. Plans were made. Plans abandoned.

“I’m an old friend.” I’m barely keeping up. We pass through double doors to a small, expensively lit seafaring chamber — brass-framed charts, brass fixtures, brass telescopes, windlasses, monkeys’ fists, boat hooks, belaying pins, fife rails — everything but an oubliette. Plus walls of big blow-up glossies of Eddie on his beloved Tore Holm yawl, the Jalina, christened to honor the departed wife and long-ago lost to creditors. Eddie is distinctive (if miniaturized) as the doughty helmsman of the big seventy-footer, bowsprit (or whatever) to the bluster and spray, sails bellied, the commodore in white ducks and shades, deliriously happy, Jalina clutching his shoulders, her straight blondy tresses streaming behind (revealing a face a bit too small for her shoulders). I could never prize anything so much. A career selling houses lets you know you can live with a lot less than you think.

“Okay, lemme just say this,” Finesse says, coming about just as we’re about to pass through another double doors, possibly to Eddie’s dying room, where his dying days are upon him. Finesse would be my choice for nurse when the time arrives — big as a tractor, strong as a bison, bristling with authority and competence, yet also with outsized no-nonsense empathies acquired in a lifetime of shepherding rich white people out of this teary vale with a minimum of bother. Possibly she has a business card.

Finesse’s protruding jaundice-y eyes and expansive forehead lean forward at me now as important signifiers. “Mr. Medley is very ill. He’s ’bout dead.” She elevates her chin, her plush mouth in a tight, pious line to represent 1. Gravity; 2. Respect; 3. Solemnity; 4. Sorrow; 5. Consideration; 6. Submission; 7. Candor; 8. Lament. Plus a hundred inexpressibles that come into play (or might) when we elect to face the final hours of another.

“I know,” I say, meekly. Now that I’m in death’s maritime anteroom, I want to be a hundred miles away from it. “Eddie announced he was dying on the radio.”

“Okay. I know ’bout all that foolishness.” Finesse’s maximum breasts expand almost audibly against her nurse’s smock, advancing her stethoscope disk out toward me then back again. “But he’s happy. He don’t mind it. His brain’s goin’ and goin’. So you don’t have to be sorrowing. Because he’s not.”

“Okay,” I say. “I don’t expect to be here long.” I hope. Finesse, I see, wears a thin gold wedding band barely visible deep in her finger flesh. Somewhere there’s a Mr. Finesse. Trenton, no doubt. A tough, wiry, agreeable man she bosses around and reminds every day how things are going to be in this world and the next. I can only imagine how much he loves her — all there is to love.

“You stay just as long in there as you want to,” Finesse says. She still has the yellow sponge in hand. “It ain’t like you makin’ him tired. He’s already tired.”

“Okay.”

“Then, here we all go.” She reaches for the knob, pushes back the door to reveal… Eddie (I guess)… propped up in bed, looking not like Glenn Ford but like a little bespectacled monkey who’s reading The Economist.

“Who’s that?” the tiny creature who might be Eddie says, as if alarmed, his mouth making a shocked, half-open, toothy grimace, his brow furrowing above a pair of reading glasses, his little spidery fingers setting The Economist out of the way so he can see. He looks terrifying and terrified. Almost nothing Eddie-ish is recognizable.

“Who you think it is?” Finesse says archly. “Yo’ ole man-friend who called you up this mornin’.”

“Who?” Eddie croaks.

“It’s Frank, Olive.” With overpowering reluctance, I make an awkward step-in through the door, my gaze fixed on him. My mouth and cheeks are working at a smile that won’t quite materialize. I stuff my hands in both pants pockets as if they’re cold. I’m already doing this badly. I lack the skill set. Who’d want it?

“Now don’t start actin’ like you don’t know who it is,” Finesse says bossily, moving with casual, mountainous authority toward the foot of the metal bed brought in by her hospice team. Part of the death package. Brusquely, she re-situates the metal drip stand Eddie’s connected to and that’s delivering clear fluid out of a collapsible sachet into a port on the back of his cadaverous left hand. Eddie’s covered to his chin in a hospital-blue sheet and is barely detectable beneath it.

“Okay, okay. I know.” He coughs without flailing an arm over his mouth, which would be better.

“And cover up yo’ mouth, Mr. Nasty!” Finesse gives the minuscule Eddie a frosty frown, as if he can’t hear her.

“I’m not catching,” Eddie’s little head says. It’s what he said on the phone. His beleaguered eyes dart to me, his smile becoming conspiratorial. He is our Olive underneath.

“Who says you wasn’t catchin’? I don’t know that.” Finesse puts one large hand behind Eddie’s scrawny neck, then another low down on his back and moves him upward onto his slab of pillows like a marionette, revealing bony shoulders, more of his small arms, and a bit of emaciated chest and ribs underneath his hospital smock the same bland, green color as hers. “Sit on up,” she says irritably. “You all scrunched down. How you s’pose to talk to your friend?” Finesse hasn’t looked my way since I came in. Eddie is her lookout. Not me. “You can come on and get close to him,” she says — to me — without looking. “He might cough on you, though, so be careful.” She has the sponge tucked under her arm.

“I don’t remember you being so goddamn tall,” Eddie croaks, up on his pillows. He is still monkey-ish. I edge closer without wanting or meaning to. The room is a bedroom. Heavy curtains block the windows. Pale outside light seeps around the edges, turning the air greenish. It’s possible to think it’s three in the morning, not ten A.M. Eddie has a gooseneck lamp shining onto where he was reading his Economist. His bed is cluttered with books, newspapers, Christmas cards, a copy of Playboy, a laptop, a plastic player that pipes music to his ear via a wire, but lying unused on the sheet. A tiny, un-majestic, plastic Christmas tree sits on his bed table, something Finesse has no doubt bought at CVS and brought along. Elsewhere on the bed are scattered a bunch of what look like brochures — the top one proposing “Best Buys in Kolkata”—as if Eddie was planning a trip. Fike, little Christian brigand, has left behind a shiny pamphlet with a red cross on its front above the words “We Appeal to You.” I’ve brought nothing, not even my full self.

“Look at that shit,” Eddie rasps, his voice clipped and high-pitched after coughing. He’s gesturing behind me at two big TVs, bracketed high up, side by side, over the door I just came through and that Finesse is now gliding back out of, saying “Y’all just carry on y’all talkin’. I’ll be in here.” Both TVs are going but silent. On one, a group of big smiling white men in business suits and cowboy hats is crowded behind the podium of the stock exchange, soundlessly ringing in another day’s choker profits and looking blameless. On the other is an aerial view of The Shore. Surf sudsy. Beaches empty. The famous roller coaster, up to its knees in ocean. Somewhere down there my wife is at present counseling grievers. Possibly everything to a dying man is an emblem of the same thing: it’s all a lot of shit.

Eddie’s commenced coughing again, though he also seems to be laughing. He’s shaking his head, trying to talk. “We don’t really achieve much clarity, do we, Basset Hound?” His laughter’s encountering serious obstacles down deep. “I don’t think…” (cough, grind, gag, gulp) “that information’s…” (last laugh attempt, then the deep “Uh-ooo” groan I heard on the phone) “… that information’s really power, do you?”

“Maybe not. I haven’t thought much about it.”

“Why would you?” Eddie manages. “Everybody knows everything. It’s probably better.” He subsides back into his bunched pillows and goes silent.

Eddie’s the poster boy for death-warmed-over. No one was ever intended to look like Eddie and be breathing — his facial skin gone to parchment, his eyes deep in bony, zombie-sockets, his temples caved. Someone (Finesse) has smeared Vaseline on his clean-shaven cheeks to keep him from what? Drying up? Liquefying? His face glistens evilly. The whole room feels soggy and muggy, the breathable milieu of the soon-to-be-gone. Why did I come here when I could’ve stayed home, humming Copland and practicing my Narpool? Just because I could? That’s not good enough.

And where’s the mellow-voiced male companion I talked to on the phone? Obviously Finesse has taken his place. I miss him even without knowing him.

On his bed table beside the pathetic plastic Christmas tree, sit cluttered all the odious sick-room implements Eddie needs in order to die better — tissues, a covered metal tray, a silver beaker with a white flexible straw for him to get a sip. Several printed prescription containers. Though there’re no resuscitative trappings — no wall defibrillator or electric paddles to stand clear of, no digital gauges to tick off the heart’s gradual sink-sink-sink to sayonara. Only a shiny new walker and an empty wheelchair folded into the corner. The patient’s not walking out of here in a better frame of mind.

Eddie, however, has also dyed his thick hair as black as tar. Though the dye, something else Finesse grabbed at the CVS, has run below Eddie’s hairline, making him look even weirder — worse than he’s going to look once he breathes his last. At the end, life does not become him.

Strangely — to me, anyway — just beneath the wall TVs hangs a color picture of Smiley Obama, big teeth white as aspirins, elbows faux athletically tight-in to his skinny ribs, bending forward shaking hands with a small, grinning, gray-haired man who used to be Eddie. Behind them hangs a square red-and-gray banner with MIT Entrepreneurs Club For Barack printed on it. I’m sure Fike took it in.

“So.” Eddie’s staring upward at the blank ceiling. He coughs smally, and with his spectral fingers pulls his sheet closer to his chin, straining the tubing to his hand. Possibly he’s practicing being a corpse. “How are you, Frank?”

“Pretty good,” I say, whispering. Why?

“What’re you reading?” Eddie breathes in deeply. A rusty-metal clank noise comes out of him, not — it seems — through his mouth.

“I like to read the letters of famous writers,” I say. It’s true. “I feel like I’m in on an interesting conversation. I’m reading Larkin’s letters to his girlfriend. He was an anti-Semite, a racist, and a cad. I find that pretty interesting.”

“Uh-huh,” Eddie grunts. Not interested. Another small cough. “I got this crud flying through that goddamn volcano ash from London a few years ago. Or, who knows, maybe the goddamn hurricane did it. I don’t know. Nothing else makes sense.”

I pause. Not likely. “Maybe so.”

Eddie moves his small left foot to the side and out from under his bedsheet. The top of his foot is angrified, dried and scrawny — vestigial. He wiggles his toes and raises his head to give a look and re-affiliate with his foot’s existence. For some reason — it’s an awful thought — I think of Eddie being helped out of his bed in his gaping green smock (to get to the john) and exposing his awful ass and poor, same-sized dick. I would avert my eyes.

“You wrote a book, didn’t you?” Eddie returns his scalded foot to the covers’ protection.

“A long time ago,” I say. “Two. I wrote two. I put the second one in a desk drawer and locked it and burned the desk.” Not true but true enough.

“I wonder,” Eddie says, his brow and mouth for a moment relaxed. “I always wonder. I was an engineer.” The past tense naturally fits the moment. “I wonder, when you write a book, how do you know when you’ve finished it? Do you know ahead of time? Is that always clear? It baffles me. Nothing I did had an end.”

This of course is the question my students used to ask thirty years ago when, for a few fierce months, I taught at a small New England college while my first marriage circled down the drain in the aftermath of our son’s death. Why they were interested in that always baffled me, since they stood at the bright beginning of their privileged lives, had never finished anything of importance and possibly never would. Eddie is/was (he’s both) probably one of those people who wants to know all about everything he’s doing at the precise moment he does it. In this case dying.

“Endings always seemed pretty arbitrary to me, Eddie. I wasn’t very good at them. I’m not the only person who said so.”

Eddie’s little raisin eyes move slowly my way behind his smudged glasses. A look of giddy reproach. He is an awful sight — dyed hair, Vaselined cheeks, Jolly Roger smile of doomed intensity. Though he can still cerebrate and feel reproach. “You mean you just stopped when you felt like it?”

“Not exactly. I asked myself if I had anything more to say — if I’d gotten myself fully expressed. And if the answer was yes, I stopped. You bet. But if I didn’t, I kept on putting words down.”

“Doesn’t sound right,” Eddie says. He coughs three shallow, staccato gaks, then gropes for a tissue from the box on the bed table. He gaks again and deposits something ungodly into a fold of the tissue, then wipes a bit of it back on his lips. Probably he’s ready to start in again about there being too few people dying, and how we need to do something about it pronto. He’s still trying.

I hear Finesse in the next room. She’s left the door open to keep tabs on us and is talking on her phone. “I thought he’d come up and get me, okay?” she’s saying sternly. “I thought I knew him. But you can’t ever think you know nobody. You know what I’m sayin’? I mean, if I’m s’posed to fuck a sixty-year-old man, it’s damn sure gon’ be my husband. Uh-huh.”

Eddie’s gaze has wandered back to the TVs. One’s tuned to evil-empire Fox. The other, to blandly see-it-your-way CNN. Fox has begun showing the skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza, where half the world is on the ice below a preposterously large and lighted Christmas tree. CNN’s rehearsing last weekend’s NFL offerings. My sudden fear is that Eddie’s literary interest means he’s about to hit me up to read something — something he’s written — his own memoir, or a “novel” whose central character’s an inventor named “Eric.” Once you publish a book, even a hundred years back and have lost the sight in both eyes, you’re still fair game.

Finesse’s big coifed head suddenly appears in the door from the seafaring room. She’s holding her red cell phone in her hand. “You all still alive in there? You awful quiet.” She looks pityingly in at us. “I don’t hear no laughin’ and tellin’ jokes. You ain’t got all serious, have you?” She gives me a mock-serious frown. “I don’t want to have to give both you an enema. He done had his. My sister up in Newark says it’s a big storm comin’ on. I hope neither one of y’all’s plannin’ a Christmas trip.” I am. She disappears again.

“You know, they’re not keeping me alive here, Frank,” Eddie says — hoarse, his voice strained and boyish. “Hospice doesn’t do that. Life just happens or it doesn’t. Bravery’s not involved. It’s interesting. Everybody ought to do it at least once.” Eddie’s deviled, dyed-hair, Vaseline-smudged face looks shocked, as if he’s trying to laugh again, but can only register alarm. “Oh,” he manages. “Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.”

“Can I do anything for you, Eddie?” I’ve inched closer to his bedside but am not inclined to touch him.

“Like what?” Eddie croaks.

“An enema.”

Eddie’s eyes snap at me. “You’d probably like it.”

“Not all of it,” I say. “Ole Olive. You’ve got yourself in a pickle here, haven’t you?”

“Do you think so?” Eddie says, his parched lips curled.

Finesse laughs at something her sister in Newark has had to say. “I was never a good sleeper, anyway,” she says and laughs raucously.

Eddie takes a deep clattering breath. Each one of these could be his last. Eddie could pop off as dead as a mallet with me standing here pointless, hardly knowing him. “Mr. Medley expired while joking with an unidentified man about enemas.”

Audible outside the house, across the soggy, puddly grounds of casa Eddie, comes the lonely ping-ping-ping and guttural heave ’n’ hump of a heating oil truck. Skillman’s — I’ve seen it when driving over. It’s making a delivery, possibly to this very domicile. I hope my Sonata’s not in the way when the driver starts backing up without looking.

“You know”—Eddie gulps hard and dry and thin—“all this shit you think you can’t live with. Colostomy bag. Vegetative state. Commandant at Bergen-Belsen. You can live with anything. The mind just goes back to a previous state.”

“Maybe that’s enough clarity,” I say, beside his bed.

“Yeah. Maybe.” Eddie breathes again almost easily. For a moment, he seems less under subversive attack, as if his brain had struck a truce with his body’s assailants. Maybe my being here is a benefaction. A very bad smell now escapes from under Eddie’s covers. No telling what. “What I can’t live with — it’s awful to say. Awful to know. I realize I won’t ever pass a woman in a revolving door and have her look at me in that way. You know? That’s over. It’s shameful to say that. Every productive thing I ever did came from that feeling. I know it about myself.” Eddie fiddles up under his sheet with the hand not tubed up to the drip bag. “Ohhhh,” he moans and averts his face in recognition of whatever he’s come into contact with down there. A catheter or some equally monstrous intrusion on his person. So many things can go wrong, it’s strange any go right. I’m thinking maybe two miniature Vietnamese masseuses — a mercy flight from KumWow — might offer Eddie a better send-off than I’m managing; affirm his faith that life happens ’til it doesn’t. Finesse wouldn’t mind.

“It’s not shameful, Eddie,” I say, relative to the origin of his species. “Everything comes from someplace.”

“I have to tell you something, Frank,” Eddie says quickly, his chest expanding under his blue sheet, as if he’s trying to suppress a new onslaught.

“That’s what I’m here for.” Not literally true. Eddie may mistake me for the angel of death, and this moment his last try at coherence. Death makes of everything in life a dream.

“I have to get this out of my head. I don’t want to die being driven crazy by it. I might as well not die.”

“Give me your worst, Eddie.” Wise to keep all responses to a minimum. Locate my Default Self. It doesn’t matter what I say anyway. Eddie and I are of one mind — life is a matter of subtractions.

Finesse again leans into the doorway, gives us another look of worried but mock disapproval. “Y’all ain’t no fun.” She fattens her cheeks as if she’s disgusted. Eddie and I might as well be one person.

“I fucked Ann.” Eddie’s staring straight up — fiercely — out of his vanquished, soon-to-be-untenanted body, his ghastly beady eyes unblinking behind his specs, in their hollow, bony sockets, the tops of which have black hair-dye encroaching.

At least, I believe that’s what Eddie’s just said. His stricken face indicates he thinks he said something important.

“What?” I could’ve heard him wrong. Neither of us is talking very loud. Then in case I’m right, I say, “When?”

Eddie lets go with an immense cough — a bottom scraper. This time he covers his mouth and emits a groan. For a moment he seems incapable of speaking and purses his gunked lips like a zipper.

“What?” I say again, still not very loud, but pushing in a little closer.

Eddie clears his throat and makes an awful gasping-gurgling noise, then very fast says, “You-were-away-teaching-someplace-in-Mass. It-wasn’t-that-long-after-your-son-died-she-was-alone — Jalina-had-left. Uhhhhgh. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I was careless.”

“What?” I say a third time. “When I was… teaching? You fucked Ann?” A pause. “My Ann?” Another pause. “Why’d you do that?”

It isn’t so much I’m saying these words as much as they’re being vocalized through me. I hear them when Eddie does.

“I can’t put the genie back in the bottle now, Frank.” Eddie gulps, then gurgles, then averts his head as if he wants to recede into the deathly air, like the specter he’ll soon be. Outside, the Skillman Oil truck’s commencing its large liquid infusion. Durning, durning, durning, through the house pipes, into a cast receptacle. “I fell in love with her, Frank,” Eddie’s strangled voice manages, his monkey face still staring away. “I wanted her to live with me in France. In Deauville. Take her on my boat. She said no. She loved you. I don’t want to die with that deception as my legacy. I’m so sorry.” Eddie heaves. Pain, sob — what’s the difference?

“Why…” I’m about to say something I’m not really sure about the nature of. Why have you told me this? Why should I believe you? Why would this come up now — when your last breaths are prizable and should be saved for prizable utterances? Why would I want to hear this? I’m looking down at poor Eddie. What my face portrays I don’t know. What should it portray? It’s possible I have no words or feelings for what Eddie’s just told me. Which is satisfactory.

“You-two-were-almost-divorced, Frank,” Eddie says speedily, as if my hands were around his neck. They aren’t.

“Well,” I say, and pause and think a moment, back through the years. “That’s not exactly true, Eddie.” I am immensely, imperturbably calm. A calm with few words. “We did get divorced. That’s true. But we weren’t almost divorced. We were married. That’s the wrong order. Time goes the other way. Or it used to.”

“I know,” Eddie croaks. “You and I didn’t know each other that well, Frank.” Again, the clattery, clunking fireplace-grate noises deep in Eddie’s breathing machinery — unidentifiable except as fatal.

“No,” I say. No, that’s right. No, you’re wrong. No, perhaps now’s the time for your last breath.

I have recently developed a tiny groove in the rear of my lower right canine, something my night guard should protect me against but of course doesn’t. My tongue finds it now and scours it until there’s a leakage of rich tongue blood I can taste. I also feel slight pelvic-pain heat below-decks. I’d like to get the fuck out of here; maybe stand outside and have a word in the driveway with Ezekiel Lewis, driver of the Skillman truck and scion of a long line of Haddam Lewises, stretching beyond last century’s mists, when their great-great-grandfather Stand-Off Lewis came up from Dixie accompanying a stalwart young white seminarian as his valet. And, naturally, stayed. I once employed Ezekiel’s father, Wardell, when I was in the realty business. They are our heritage here. We are their spoiled legacy. If I had one black friend in town, him or her I’d keep. There’d be plenty of laughing involved. Not this kind of tired, tiresome, unhappy, deathbed shit I’m putting up with at the moment. White people’s shit. No wonder we’re disappearing. We’re over-bred. Our genie’s out of its bottle.

“Tell me what you think of me, Frank.” Eddie’s regard wants to come back to me, but gets claimed by the two TVs high on the wall. Fox has loser Romney, addressing a convention of habited nuns, beaming as if he’d just won something. CNN has a smiling Andy Williams, who, it seems, has sadly died. Both — dead and alive — seek our approval.

But is this all that life comes down to when you take away damn near everything? What do you think of me? Tell me, tell me, tell me! My wife said the same thing to me just days ago. It must be grief not to know.

“It doesn’t change anything, Olive,” I say, not sure what I could mean by that. It’s just the truest thing I can say. Maybe Eddie would like me to give him a punch in the nose on his deathbed. (What would Finesse think of that?) But I’m not mad — at anyone. A wound you don’t feel is not a wound. Time fixes things, mostly.

“I’m an insomniac, Frank,” Eddie says and coughs shallowly, fading eyes still on the TVs — which one I can’t be sure. Mitt or Andy. “Things get in my head and won’t go away.”

“Most insomniacs sleep more than they think they do, Eddie.” I take a step back from his bed. I’m departing. We both are.

Eddie’s cell phone on the bed starts ringing with a tune. What good is sit-ting a-lone in your room, come hear the muuusic play.. .

“I’m dying and the fucking phone rings,” Eddie says, his wraith’s hand clutching, fumbling through the bedclothes. He smiles at me gratefully, venomously. “Lemme get this. If I can. Sorry.” He gasps and squeezes his weary eyes shut to be able to speak.

“Go for it, Olive.” I raise my hand like an Indian brave.

“Eddie Medley,” I hear him say, hoarse, high-pitched, evanescent. “Who’s this? Hello!”

Start by ad-mit-ting from crad-le to tomb is-n’t that long a stay.. .

I’m gone.

OUTSIDE, IN LATE-DECEMBER LATE-MORNING SPRING, it’s hard to believe that in one day’s time all will be white and Christmas-y, and I will be on a sentimental journey to the nation’s midsection. My son and I will have some laughs, crack some corny jokes, see a great river and the Great Plains’ commencement, eat some top KC sirloin, possibly visit Hallmark and the house of Thomas Hart Benton (a favorite of mine), and talk long into the night about rent-to-own. If I can only get there.

The two scolding crows have exited their branch in the beech tree. I hear them not far away in another yard, other things on their minds. Given all, I’m feeling surprisingly good about this day, with much of it still to come. The taste of blood in my mouth has vanished.

“All right now, all right…” A voice I know — Ezekiel’s — coming round the side of Eddie’s deteriorating house, ready to slide the fuel bill under the door, as he does at my house. “… Christmas gift!” he sings out and smiles at me as if I’m a fixture out here on the pea gravel, no different from the Henry Moore bronze.

“Christmas gift,” I say back in the old southern way. Though he’s as Jersey as they come. Ezekiel is a strapping, smiling, shaved-head, spiritual dynamo in his green Skillman jumpsuit. We “go back” without having to know each other all that well or be friends. White southerners all think we “know” Negroes better than we do or could. They may think they know us, too — with better reason. Ezekiel, though, is good on any scale of human goodness. He is thirty-nine, attends the AME Tabernacle over in the black trace, coaches wrestling at the Y, teaches Sunday School, volunteers at the food bank. His wife, Be’ahtrice, teaches high school math and knows the universal sign language. He is bedrock. The best we have to offer.

Off, streets away, I hear again the bells of St. Leo gong-gonging out carols for the spiritually wavering. “Doesn’t feel much like Christmas,” I say.

“If you don’t like the weather…” Ezekiel’s going past me, smiling as if he has a secret.

“… just wait ten minutes,” I say. He is as fully expressed as anyone I know. “Are you heading for a big holiday, Mr. Lewis?” I say, standing by my still-warm car, taking him admiringly in.

“Oh, yeah. Count my blessings.” He’s bending to slip the yellow card under the door bottom. Eddie will never see it. Ezekiel is a huge man, though dainty in his practiced movements. “Our church’s taking a panel truck of food and whatever over to those people sufferin’ on The Shore. Cain’t do that much. But I’m here. So I cain’t do nothin’.” He’s headed back toward me in the sunny morning.

“That’s right,” I say. It is. I will think on it more. Time fixes things, but it is also short, and precious.

“I started taking Spanish lessons at the Y,” Ezekiel says. A trace of heating oil scent accompanies him, his big, soiled workman’s gloves in his hand. “Be’ahtrice and I are both doin’ it. There’s a church over in Asbury. A lot of ’em don’t even speak our language. How they gon’ make out?” He’s nodding, his cheeks partly inflated by thought. Christmas is serious to him. An opportunity. Heating oil is secondary.

We’re unexpectedly, then, trapped in the instant — too much sudden seriousness. We fall silent. Though he smiles at me in recognition. I smile back. It becomes for us a moment to know the expanding largeness of it all.

“How’s your son Ralph, Mr. Bascombe?” He means my son Paul. They knew each other long ago in school. It is a sweetness that brings tears to my eyes.

“He’s fine, Ezekiel. He’s just fine. I’ll tell him you asked.”

“Is he still…” Ezekiel looks at me oddly. He’s sensed his mistake and is transfixed. It is the finest of fine with me.

“He is,” I say. “He’s still in Kansas City. He runs a garden supply out there.” I touch my fingertip to my eye’s corner.

“He was always good with that,” Ezekiel says,

“He was,” I lie.

“All right then.” Ezekiel’s moving. “Santa’s gotta get on back to his sleigh and be flyin’.”

“You do that,” I say. He shakes my hand in his large, amazingly soft one. That is what we have a chance to say to each other on Christmas Eve. A few good words.

Then he goes. And I go. The day we have briefly shared is saved.